Publisher's Synopsis
Christina Georgina Rossetti (5 December 1830 - 29 December 1894) was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is famous for writing "Goblin Market" and "Remember", and the words of the Christmas carol "In the Bleak Midwinter". Although Rossetti's popularity during her lifetime did not approach that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, her standing remained strong after her death. In the early 20th century Rossetti's popularity faded in the wake of Modernism. Scholars began to explore Freudian themes in her work, such as religious and sexual repression, reaching for personal, biographical interpretations of her poetry. In the 1970s academics began to critique her work again, looking beyond the lyrical Romantic sweetness to her mastery of prosody and versification. Feminists held her as symbol of constrained female genius, placed as a leader of 19th-century poets. Her work strongly influenced the work of such writers as Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings, and Philip Larkin. Critic Basil de Selincourt stated that she was "all but our greatest woman poet ... incomparably our greatest craftswoman ... probably in the first twelve of the masters of English verse".
